NEWARK, NJ – New Jersey’s largest and most prestigious conference commemorating Black History Month celebrates its landmark 30th anniversary this year. The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series will bring thirty years of African American history and scholarship to public light on February 19 and 20, 2010 at Rutgers University’s Newark Campus.

A special two-day conference in memory of John Hope Franklin and Giles R. Wright, II, will take place on Friday, February 19 from 1 to 4 p.m., and Saturday, February 20 from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the Paul Robeson Campus Center, Rutgers-Newark. It is free and open to the public.

Fourteen previous Wright lecturers and historical luminaries from the past three decades will assemble to speak to the 2010 theme in a series of panel discussions examining the past, present, and future of African-American scholarship. Rutgers Professor Annette Gordon Reed, a noted Jeffersonian scholar and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize recipient for her book The Hemingses of Monticello, will give the Wright Lecture on Saturday, February 20th. To hear an interview with Gordon-Reed about her book, go to

Special guest speakers will also include Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution.

The 2010 Wright Lecture Series opens with two panel discussions on Friday, February 19th. The Making and Evolution of the Field, featuring panelists John Bracey, Eric Foner, Sterling Stuckey, and Cheryl Wall, will explore the extraordinary profusion of scholarship on African American historical narratives and themes over the past generation. Panelists Spencer Crew, James Oliver Horton, Joe William Trotter, and Deborah Gray White will examine the role of the scholar as an actively engaged citizen in the second panel of the day, The Scholar in Civic Space.

Following Annette-Gordon Reed’s keynote lecture on Saturday, February 20th, afternoon panel discussions will look at Citizenship, History, and Remembering African American Life, an exploration of African American historical scholarship, and the study race, as a contested feature of American democratic discourse and scholarship with panelists David Blight, Bob Herbert and Wilson Jeremiah Moses. The final panel of the conference, What’s Ahead for the Field? with panelists Nell Painter, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Bettye Collier Thomas, will examine how the future of American historical scholarship is being shaped by the field.

Past and current Geraldine R. Dodge Fellows at the Institute, Miriam Petty, Rosamond King, George White, Christina Collins, and Mark Krasovic, will moderate the discussions over the two-day period.

The lecture series was co-founded in 1981 by Dr. Clement Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers University, and Giles R. Wright, from the New Jersey Historical Commission. Over the past 29 years, the conference has drawn thousands of people to the Rutgers-Newark campus, and has attracted some of the nation’s foremost scholars and humanists who are experts in the field of African and African American history and culture.

“We know of no other campus, and certainly not of another community, that for so long has generously embraced the new ways we Americans and citizens of the world now understand and honor the historical narratives of Africans on American soil,” according to Dr. Price. “With that in mind, the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series is a civic ritual without peer. It is also a prominent symbol of civic engagement, public scholarship at a very high level, and community endearment to lifelong learning.”

The annual conference was named for East Orange native Dr. Marion Thompson Wright, a pioneer in African American historiography and race relations in New Jersey, who served for many years on the faculty of Howard University. An honors graduate of Newark’s Barringer High School and Columbia University’s Teachers College Class of 1938, she was the first professionally trained woman historian in the United States.

The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series is sponsored by the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, the Federated Department of History, Rutgers-Newark and the New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the New Jersey Historical Commission/Department of State. The 2010 conference is being mounted with major funding support from the Prudential Foundation, and receives additional support from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the Rutgers Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes.

For additional information about the program, visit the Institute’s website at: http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu, or contact the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, 973/353/3891.

Robeson Campus Center is wheelchair-accessible, as is the Rutgers-Newark campus. Rutgers‑Newark can be reached by New Jersey Transit buses and trains, the PATH train and Amtrak from New York City, and by Newark City Subway. Metered parking is available on University Avenue and at Rutgers‑Newark’s public parking garage, at 200 University Ave. Printable campus maps and driving directions are available online at: http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/maps/index.php